Thursday, February 28, 2013

Q: Name two parts of the human body, 10 letters in all. Place their names one after the other. Take a block of three consecutive letters out of the second word and insert them somewhere inside the first word without otherwise changing the order of any of the letters. The result will name a kind of doctor. What kind of doctor is it?

I'm afraid I don't have the answer yet. I've been fixated on trying to make wrist, waist or chest work to create an -ist word. Perhaps it isn't a conventional doctor but is something else? Reminds me of our Halloween theme several years back.

Edit: Shortly after I posted I figured out that Will was looking for an adjective, not a noun. And as suspected, it wasn't a traditional human medical doctor.

187 comments:

Here's my standard reminder... don't post the answer or any hints that could lead directly to the answer (e.g. via Google or Bing) before the deadline of Thursday at 3pm ET. If you know the answer, click the link and submit it to NPR, but don't give it away here.

You may provide indirect hints to the answer to show you know it, but make sure they don't give the answer away. You can openly discuss your hints and the answer after the Thursday deadline. Thank you.

Good morning everyone. It's the 10:17 from Provo! First off, let me say that rumors of my death have been somewhat exaggerated, although I did have a brush with mortality. My gratitude to WW and Paul for taking note of my absence at the end of last week's blog. And thank you, Paul, for your backhanded well-wishes (sorta).. As it were, I drove up to Salt Lake on Wed. to visit my tailor. I was being fitted for a new suit of sheep's clothing. Mine had become threadbare and revealing, and one as vain as I, would not be caught dead in such attire for fear that I might be caught dead in such attire.

Speaking of "dead," on my way home Friday evening, I decided not to take the Veteran's Memorial Highway (the arterial thoroughfare between SLC and Provo). Instead I took the old road, thinking it would be less monotonous. It was. The near-full moon was obscured by clouds and there was a steady drizzling rain. On a particularly dark stretch of road, I saw a tall man using a scythe as a walking cane as he ambled along the righthand shoulder. I realized immediately that it was the grim reaper. I grabbed my cell and dialed 911, "I'm following a guy in a hoodie and I can tell he's up to no good!"

The distraction caused me to veer off the road and crash into a "Caution: Mutilated Cattle Crossing" sign. I was only slightly injured, but had to finish the rest of my trip to Provo in an ambulance. Thank God, I was wearing clean magic underpants. Cat scan was negative and I have been happily reunited with the pack. (7 clues)

Blizzard indeed! I have this image of you cracking the whip over a team of huskies as they leap through four-foot-high drifts. Middle-aged guys here in Provo pay big money for that kind of in-humane humiliation.

Seems like ya'll need a little nudge in the right direction. Will said a "kind" of doctor. To me, that implies a descriptor (such as witch, pulmonary, computer or foot). If you keep looking for those ~ist and ~ian suffixes, you'll never heal your aching hearts.

Most excellent, Curtis. I should add that I have a close friend in Las Vegas who is a boxer. He was seriously injured in a fight last November. (His opponent bit off part of his ear -- just like the Tyson-Hollyfield fight.) He made several visits to one of these doctors who succeeded in patching him up.

I know the "female" in question, Curtis. "She" was a drag racer as I recall. It's like the recent survey that concluded 64% of the guests on daytime talk shows are female. What they failed to mention was that 29% of them were not born that way. Not that there's any problem with that.

And furthermore, her neuterioty was based largely on her identification as a transgender racer. My friend Howie is the one drove him up to Trinidad, Colorado, for the operation last spring. At the discharge window, Howie said there was a little bowl next to the cash register with a small sign that read, "Give a P_NIS TAKE A P_NIS."

WW - your comment about a husky laugh made me laugh. My racer friend was the retired greyhound that we had for many years. She actually enjoyed going to the Vet because the Vet bribed her with peanut butter.

Imagine, if you will, that a dog is making his rounds in the neighborhood one fine day and suddenly has an urgent need to raise his leg, only to discover much to his dismay that there is no fire hydrant handy. What does he use?

Zeke ~ Heavens above on a street called love, bro! If you're gonna burdon us with musical clues, please wait till some night when the weather is a little warmer and we're all sitting on a dock baying at the moon so we can at least sing along. If not for the sake of this blog, then for the sake of your own peace of mind.

Another ex-hippie who has narrowly escaped working for the corporate overlords.GuerrillaBoy

PS: This clue is dedicated to Blaine's bloggers, who may not know it, but they are beautiful.

Thanks, WW, but I already gathered that from AbqG's 'descriptor' remark...sorta.My deleted clue (below) was on the blog for a few hours this morning until I decided it pointed too directly to the answer. It's the only thing I really care to say about this puzzle. I guess I can say it was a 6-digit number, and the sum of the digits was 13 without giving too much away.As I'm sure you're aware, the plural/singular comment above does not refer to the puzzle, but to three instances of one pronoun in the song.

The deleted comment was: 180112It refers to a train they call the James Herriot.Roughly the same information can be obtained by decoding my Vigenère cipher at Tue Feb 26, 11:55:00 AM PST with the keyword veteranery; if you use veterinary, you still might be able to figure it out. I don't know, I guess Mr. Applegate made me do that.Exelon operates a power generating station in a place called Eddystone. The Baldwin 60000 was built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Eddystone in 1926. And I thought Baldwin made pianos. Nowadays, an outfit called Enbridge is converting the train facility at Exelon's retired Unit2 to receive tankers of North Dakota Bakken crude for East Coast refineries.If all the blood vessels in your body were placed end to end, you'd be dead.You gotta have miles and miles and miles of capillaries, too.

MrScience, your posting on last week's blog had me convinced that veterinarian could not be right since it had 12 letters and since the clue remained on the blog so long. It took me awhile to come back to veterinary. So, like my pup, I spent time circling around and around . . .when the answer was right there all along. <Exit clicking ruby slippers>.

Reminds me of the old Bob Newhart routine. Thousands of monkeys given typewriters (told you it was old). Checkers wander by to see what's been done. Eventually, one calls out "Hey, Ed! I think I got one. This must be famous or something ... 'To be or not to be, that is the gzornenplutzx.'"

WW, thanks for your encouragement. When I finally solved it, I was in no shape to do anything. (Mrs. Science and I were away for a long weekend in the mountains.) When I next got on line, I was pleased to see that Blaine had already deleted it.

Music could lead one to the two body parts and the kind of doctor that is the answer. One of Simon and Garfunkel's lesser known works, but outstanding nonetheless comes to mind. So does a song from "Damn Yankees."

I was so frustrated with this puzzle that I walked 3 blocks in the rain to my friends Klaus and Klaudia to ask for help. When they opened the door they took one look at me and said in unison, "Come inside, you're all wet!"

Along those lines, SDB...I have a part-time night job as a front desk clerk at the Provo Hyatt. There is an eccumenical conference being hosted here this week and last night I was checking in a Father Delaney from New York. After he signed in, he asked me, "Please make certain that all the X-rated movies on the TV in my room are completely disabled." With a complete straight face, I responded, "I'm so sorry, Father, we only have regular X-rated movies at our hotel."

One of these days my horsing around is gonna land me at the unemployment office...or worse yet, in the emergency room.

PS: Speaking of horsing around, veteran pedophile, Jerry Sandusky, missed his calling. Instead of coaching football, he should have become one of these doctors. When Papa Joe saw four feet --all facing the same direction-- under the shower curtain, the explanation Jerry offered for his antics would have been more plausible.

ABG, it wasn't Joe who witnessed the deed, but his assistant. But, getting back to my original post, red shoes; brown shoes——a shitneel nonetheless. And that reminds me of the transgender Mother Superior who, after gender reassignment, went from Nun the Less to Les the Nun. Just another case of Jerry man enduring.

Last Sunday I said, “For a while this morning I felt like I was just going around in circles but sometimes that’s the best way to do what needs to be done.” Just like blood circulating through your veins and arteries to deliver oxygen to your organs.

Rather poorly worded in my opinion and I would like to have posted the following as a hint, but being that desecration is the better part of velour, I restrained myself. Anyway:

I think Will Shortz should vet these puzzles before he posts them.

Now My Actual Hints:

"Not an easy puzzle this week, but I guess I'm an old hand at it because I solved it." An old hand is a veteran.

"I don't mean to carp on, but I expect a low turnout again this week, which means it becomes more likely someone on this blog will be basqueing (or is that basking?) in the glory next Sunday." Glory as in vainglory. Also Basque people living in America are noted for raising sheep, but in Spain for carp fishing. Both are of the animal kingdom.

“I must admit trying to solve this puzzle had me yelling my rage at Will this morning and I began to lose my voice just as I finally got the answer." When one loses his voice it may be said that he became horse.

Chosen vessel/veins & arteries.Music clue/the Animals.Vain/vein.Grrrreat/Tony the Tiger.60000/approx # miles of veins & arteries.Dr. Duval/Dr. in Fantastic Voyage thru the veins and arteries.Fantastique...voyageur/I can free up 501 days to go to Mars!

Hi Lorenzo, I am laughing out loud re: your above post about Biff because I almost posted similar comments yesterday when I looked at the cartoon again via Blaine's link. I hadn't seen it in many years, but frequently find myself thinking about it. After I noticed that the cartoon was oriented slightly differently than my mind sees it, I looked at Biff and immediately began wondering what he must have been thinking. I thought he looked like he knew the awful truth, but also recognized the futility of the situation.

I also became aware, again via Blaine, that this particular Gary Larson cartoon seems to stay with many of us, probably mostly men.

Clearly, Biff is on the horns of a dilemma. Me, too. I've been invited to a party, and, while I'd like to wish the honoree all the best, I hesitate to even open the door when it's fluctuating around zero(plus or minus 11.42857). Besides, I don't think my Tate's compass will even get me to Stockton, frankly. Maybe next year."Tastes more like cornflakes."

New puzzle's up, and like the Car Talk Puzzler, it's mathematical: Eight people are seated at a circular table. Each person gets up and sits down again — either in the same chair or in the chair immediately to the left or right of the one they were in. How many different ways can the eight people be reseated?

Probably man/woman, married/single, elligible...surely this is a proper occasion. Hey Lmpy, have you got it? Only 150 on last week's easy puzzle. You and your ilk should really shine this week. Choice of majors may make all the difference. :-)

Let's say we number the seats clockwise from 1 to 8. Now one of the ways to reseat the people is seats 1 & 2 swap and everybody else stays where they were. Another way is seats 2 & 3 swap and everybody else stays where they were.

Now one thing that bothers me is, did I just give 2 different possible arrangements, or would Will say that just gave the same possible arrangement twice?

Those are 2 different arrangements. Let's number the chairs clockwise from the top, 1 through 8. Let's name the people A through H. Everyone's sitting in a chair initially, lets call the initial configuration {A1,B2,C3,D4,E5,F6,G7,H8}. Your arrangements are {A2,B1,C3,D4,E5,F6,G7,H8} and {A1,B3,C2,D4,E5,F6,G7,H8}. Keep going....

Jan, I sure hope Will agrees with you. I've already submitted my answer based on that.

My concern was this: Suppose we represent the possible solutions by two circles, one inside the other, both marked off every 45°, with paths drawn from initial position (inside) to new position (outside)? Now suppose the area between the circles can be rotated around. If two rearrangements could be considered identical if one can be rotated into the other, then that would certainly reduce the number of possible rearrangements now, wouldn't it?